The present invention generally relates to manufacturing, remanufacturing or repairing replaceable imaging components, such as a laser printer toner cartridge, and more particularly to apparatus and techniques for modifying a signal provided to the replaceable imaging component.
In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging cartridges such as toner cartridges, drum cartridges, inkjet cartridges, and the like. These imaging cartridges are used in imaging devices such as laser printers, xerographic copiers, inkjet printers, facsimile machines and the like, for example. Imaging cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process these cartridges would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed specifically to address this issue. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the imaging cartridge.
Due to the characteristics of particular types of replacement toner or cartridge components used in the remanufacturing process, certain problems may develop during printing using a toner cartridge containing the replacement toner. These problems may be caused by excess residual toner particles clinging to a component, such as the primary charge roller (PCR), of the toner cartridge, resulting in the excess toner being transferred to the paper in the form of print defects. Thus, there is a need for techniques to prevent such print defects and to provide systems and methods for modifying the operating characteristics of components used in a remanufactured toner cartridge.
Additionally, the density of the printed output of a laser printer is directly dependent on the bias voltage applied to the developer roller of the toner cartridge. The printer supplies this bias voltage signal to the developer roller and can control this voltage and monitor the printed output. This is done in several steps during the printer calibration process so that the optimum print quality can be maintained.
Such a calibration process has been designed to produce an optimum developer voltage for the particular characteristics of the original toner. When a cartridge is remanufactured often the original toner is not available and a replacement must be used. As described above, the replacement toner will have different characteristics than the original and also likely have a different optimum developer voltage. Thus, there is a need for techniques for modifying the operating characteristics of components, such as a developer roller voltage, for example, used in a remanufactured toner cartridge.